Muslim Testifies Against Islamism to Congress

Muslim Testifies Against Islamism to Congress

From Rusty at Jawa:

I missed Rep. King's hearing this morning on homegrown radicalism. If any one sees the footage up at YouTube or elsewhere, do me a favor and drop a line. Here is the text delivered by Dr. Zuhdi Jasser on why we need to focus not only on violent extremism, but also the ideological roots of that extremism which is found in political Islam more generally.

His basic argument can be summed up, I think, in: 1) One does not have to support violence in order to be an extremist (eg, someone who supports non-violent implementation of sharia which denies basic human rights such as the right to leave one's religion); 2) Those who do support violent Islamism first supported Islamism (ie, violence is only a tactic of the larger phenomenon, the larger phenomenon being the root problem.

Here's a taste:

As a faith community, focusing on the militants and violence alone is an exercise in futility which gives non-violent Islamists the ability to appear mainstream. Focusing only on violence forces non-Muslims to approach the issue of radicalization in an overly simplistic binary approach of--- good Muslim nonviolent, bad Muslim violent. 

The reality is that Muslims who are violent extremists do not become so overnight. They come to that endpoint along with common travelers within the global supremacist political movement which is Islamism or political Islam. Islamism defined is the desire of some Muslims to create Islamic states or societies based in the interpretation of Islamic law (shariah) by faith leaders where the Muslim community (ummah) is also synonymous with the "Islamic nation-state". 

These quasi-oligarchical leaders can be imams, clerics, or Islamist scholars who believe that their expertise gives them the right to determine and impose their interpretations of religion upon Muslim masses. Thus, Islamists ensnared in the theo-political movement of Islamism are inherently unable to identify with and bond positively to our own American concept of a nation based in an Establishment Clause, the separation of mosque and state, a manmade Constitution and reason.

Read the rest.